Popular social media services, such as Twitter® and Facebook® offer a means to consumers to voice their opinions and share their experiences with different consumer products and services. Consequently, they can influence the opinion of other people in their social networks about the respective products and services. Such consumer-to-consumer communication facilitated by social media services can greatly impact a company's reputation and sales. Thus, it is important for business organization to consider the social media phenomenon and monitor the customer opinions on these social media services.
However, monitoring these social media services is difficult due to the asynchronous and many-to-many interactions among users and agents of the business organizations. In addition, the sheer volume of opinions generated by consumers on the social media services makes it difficult for agents of a business organization to manually monitor the social media services.